Wednesday, 26 September 2012

Recording a Walk

I have decided to use three different methods to record the walks in Vectis. I could have chosen any of a huge variety of others, but I am constrained somewhat by the considerations of the medium. The method must fit into a book; so, for example, audio or video recordings would not be appropriate (although I have taken audio notes, and may incorporate audio somehow; perhaps a soundtrack to listen to whilst reading the book? A download perhaps; it needs some thought).

The method I've been thinking of for the third section (the coastal walk) is of taking photographs facing along the coast in opposite directions (so that one is in the direction of the walk, one looking back), and placing these photographs on opposite pages. To explore this concept, I decided to employ it to rccord one of the shorter walks, from my house to Carisbrooke Castle and back. I decided to take a photograph every 70 paces, as this was roughly the length of the path from my back gate to the road.

I did this walk on the 4th of September, but it has taken me until now to organise it all into a PDF book format. The main reason for this was the fact that, when I first began assembling the book, I made a mistake with the numbering of the files that took me the whole of this morning, and a lot of brain-ache, to untangle.

The following file is quite large. I tried making a smaller version, but it came out very corrupted. I shall perhaps fiddle with the settings and try again in future, but for the moment, this will do:

This experiment taught me a number of things, chief among them that to employ this method on the coastal walk I would, by necessity, have to choose a much longer length between photographs. The Isle of Wight coastal path (which I shall not be exactly following) is 67 miles long. Given 44 pairs of images (in the 90 days allocated for winter with pages left over for the title etc.) that gives roughly one pair of images each 1.5 miles. This, instinctively, feels like it might be too much of a distance. If I were to take pictures going only in one direction, the distance would be 0.7 miles. This might be better, although it would mean I would be unable to take advantage of a number of marvellous things about the two photos format, particularly the way (moving counterclockwise, with rear facing images on the left page and forward on the right, or clockwise with the pages vice versa) the coast would become a strip down the middle of the two pages (I want to get as close to the water margin as possible for each image). Or should I really commit to the year structure? The more I think about it, the more seductive it seems. Decisions, decisions.